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Legislative Investigations as War Power

Legislative Investigations as War Power

Mariah Zeisberg

Publisher:

Princeton University Press

DOI:10.23943/princeton/9780691157221.003.0005

This chapter returns to Congress to scrutinize another legislative discretionary power, that of investigations. While the investigatory power is normally conceived as a retrospective power of judgment, it construes investigations as both a war power and as a forward-looking tool for developing legislative war authority. The chapter compares the Munitions Investigation of 1934–36 with the Iran-Contra Investigation of 1989, arguing that the former developed far more constitutional authority for the legislature and war-making system than did the latter. The reasons may be surprising: counterintuitively, it is argued that Congress' insufficiently developed partisanship undermined the authority of its Iran-Contra Investigation as a challenge to presidential power.

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PRINTED FROM PRINCETON SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.princeton.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Princeton University Press, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HSO for personal use (for details see http://www.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 18 February 2018